


Here's One I Prepared Earlier

by Trojie



Category: Merlin (BBC)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Beltane, First Time, M/M, Magic, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-01
Updated: 2010-10-01
Packaged: 2017-10-12 08:25:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/122891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/pseuds/Trojie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the 'Beltane' round of Camelot's Closet.</p><p>Morgana's hosting a Beltane party at the family manor, and has decided Merlin and her brother Arthur are a perfect match. Merlin and Arthur disagree.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here's One I Prepared Earlier

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tarasinecera](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=tarasinecera).



It's a big fat set-up, and Merlin hates it. He hates blind dates, and he hates being innocently introduced to people's friends while everyone else nudges and winks at each other, and he wanted to just come to this damn Beltane party and get ratted and have a good time, but now ...

Here's how it goes: Merlin knows Gwen, right, and Gwen has this girlfriend called Morgana, who's into all this hippie Tarot-reading Wiccan shit (not that Merlin objects too loudly because those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones and God knows he grew up with enough crystal therapy and tea leaves and oh yeah, the name _Merlin_ , thank you so much, Mum), and Morgana has this _brother_ ...

Whom Morgana and Gwen are trying to push Merlin towards. He's refusing to go, because quietly and _privately_ bisexual does not mean 'willing to be rich boy's steep learning curve'. Beltane party, fertility rituals, blah blah Gaia moon-power thingy be damned. Merlin is well aware of the symbolism of the evening, and if Morgana thinks that it would set her brother up nicely to have a shag on a night of great pagan significance, well, she can just find someone else for him to go and have it away with.

His brain has it all reasoned out very nicely, thank you very much. However his brain doesn't appear to have a direct line to either his eyes or his reproductive organs. Thank God the guy, Arthur, never manages to catch him looking. In fact every time Merlin turns his way, he's scowling.

'You're staring again,' Gwen points out quietly, handing him a Coke. He's even annoyed about the Coke - this is actually looking like quite a nice party, and he'd _like_ to have a drink, but one drink is always one too many when it comes to the 'not making a fool of yourself' stakes, and Merlin really can't afford to make a fool of himself. He feels jumpy already, weirdly aware of everything, and he figures it's just tinfoil-hattery and paranoia on his part about being dragged here for what amounts to a blind date.

'I'm not staring, I'm just ...' He sighs. 'Alright, it's been a while, and he's good-looking, and yeah, okay. But I don't want to go there, y'know?'

Gwen smiles, and shakes her head. 'We just want you to be happy,' she says. 'Not that we think you're not happy, but, you could be happy _with_ someone, and he could too, and he's nice once you get past the stiff-necked act.'

'I know Morgana would love for her brother to properly embrace the alternative lifestyle,' Merlin begins, a little peeved. He doesn't _want_ to be set up, dammit. 'But she can find someone else for him to experiment with.'

'You assume he hasn't already done his experimentation,' Morgana purrs in Merlin's ear. He jumps, and she slinks round him. 'I wouldn't be that crass, Merlin, really. Go on, talk to him.' She touches him lightly on the shoulder, making her silver bangles chink together softly on the seam of his shirt.

'If he's interested he can bloody well come and talk to me himself,' Merlin snaps, and stalks off towards the stairs, hoping to find a bathroom. A nice, genuine excuse to get the hell out of there.

This bloody manor house is a warren, Merlin finally concludes fifteen minutes later, when he sticks his head round a door into an ostentatiously understated study, with booklined walls and an enormous wooden desk and leather chair.

'If you're looking for somewhere to hide, that's not a bad option,' says a voice. Merlin whirls around, hearing the door snick shut behind him.

In front of him is someone blond and built and sardonically leaning back on his heels. Arthur.

'Actually, I was looking for the bathroom,' Merlin says on autopilot, while his brain goes 'Okay, Arthur followed me up here. I've been followed by the guy I'm supposed to be making a move on. _Not_ making a move on. No, wait. What?' There's a weird familiarity in this situation.

'Second door on your right,' says Arthur, shrugging. 'But I wouldn't blame you if you wanted to hide. My sister's parties usually have that effect on me as well.'

'What do you do to escape?' Merlin asks, fiddling with his shirtcuffs. His cufflinks are defiantly blank white pearl in his blue shirt - no silver and definitely no black, because apart from anything else he knew Morgana was going to be wearing black and silver and there was this once when he and Morgana turned up to a party in the same colours and Gwen spent the entire night calling them bookends.

'Usually? Sit in there with a book while the mysteries of Gaia happen to other people, and try desperately to pretend there's some sanity in the world.' Arthur smirks.

Merlin snorts. 'Pentagrams and ceremonial knives not your thing?'

'Knives, maybe,' Arthur says with a thin smile. 'I collect reproductions of medieval weaponry. Pentagrams? Not so much.'

They stand there in the semi-darkness of the hallway for a few moments before Arthur makes a gesture towards the fabled bathroom and Merlin remembers what he came up here for in the first place. There's this weird buzz between them though, probably just the darkness and the fact that Merlin knows he's expected to be attracted to this guy and all the preemptive denial that produces ... but it's there. Merlin feels like he's on the edge of some great precipice.

Something is buzzing in the air or in Merlin's head. He takes a piss kind of distractedly and washes his hands in a delicate porcelain washbasin, dries his hands on a very expensive-feeling towel, and heads back out, intending to go down to the party and pretend to commune with the Gaia moon-power thingie and also pretend there's no such person as Arthur.

The first thing he notices when he gets back out into the corridor is that the door to that study is ajar, and warm honey-golden light is spilling out at the edges. He tries to walk past it quietly, but somehow Arthur must hear him.

'Merlin?' he calls. Merlin approaches the door and pushes it open softly. Arthur is sitting in the leather chair, feet propped on the desk. He's been reading - the paperback dangles in his hand as he watches Merlin walk towards him.

'I was just about to-' Merlin gestures at the door, meaning to say he doesn't want to intrude.

'Don't go,' Arthur says. 'I could use the company.' He says it carelessly, but he doesn't take his eyes away from Merlin's.

Merlin pads over and perches on the edge of the desk. He eyes the book. 'So, good book?'

'An erudite tome of cold, hard logic,' Arthur says flippantly, and lifts it to reveal the cover - 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. 'Feel free to grab something yourself.' He waves a hand around the room.

Merlin goes to inspect a shelf, trying very hard to pretend that his attention isn't fixed mostly on the man draped over all that mahogany and leather. Whether he's pretending to Arthur or to himself, he doesn't know.

He runs a finger over the spine of a copy of Shakespeare's comedies. 'Your collection?' he asks.

'My father's,' Arthur replies. 'Which explains the great preponderance of Arthurian literature and unfortunate rubbish about aliens and Atlantis.'

'Arthurian lit?' Merlin can't help but pick on that subject. Arthur sighs.

'Yes, hence the name, and hence Morgana's name. You were saying, _Merlin_?'

'Okay, I might have deserved that.' Or at least walked into it.

The carpet in here is lush and velvety, cushioning Merliin's feet in their uncomfortable dress shoes as he walks, and incidentally masking Arthur's footsteps. The first that Merlin knows of Arthur's whereabouts is when an arm reaches past him to pull 'Idylls of the King' off the shelf. He turns around. 'Gwen tells me you and she met when your respective parents dragged you along to some historical recreationist event,' Arthur says, idly leafing through the volume. 'Apparently there were tights.'

'So they tried it on you as well,' Merlin says. 'Just to clarify,' he adds, ducking under Arthur's arm as the other man slips the book back onto the shelf, 'Whatever they said about me, it's not necessarily true.' Damn, damn, damn. Gwen has been sworn to secrecy on the damn tights story since they were sixteen.

'Despite the alluring tights story, I was all set to ignore you -' Arthur continues loftily, making like he's going to pace off across the room again.

'Likewise,' Merlin can't help firing back.

'- I told myself, he'll be another bloody idiot. and he won't be my type, and I'll change my type if I have to so that he doesn't qualify, because I hate-'

'Being set up,' Merlin mutters.

'Exactly.' Arthur wheels and steps back into Merlin's space, too close, except it's not. 'But there's something about you . .. this is stupid,' he cuts himself off.

'I know,' Merlin says, a rasp coming into his voice. 'It's ridiculous.'

'What the hell are you?' Arthur asks.

'Excuse me?' Merlin's up against the bookcase now, nowhere to run.

'This isn't _normal_ ,' Arthur protests. 'I don't- I don't do this,' he adds, and they're so close. His arms are rigid by his sides, like he doesn't dare touch or try to trap Merlin, but they're chest to chest, breath to breath. 'I don't do this,' he says again, and Merlin knows what he means, and kisses him anyway.

There is a moment, just a moment, where it's a normal kiss, where they've never done this before and there's wet and teeth and awkwardness, and then - then it's like a thousand years of knowing each other kick in, sweep them away.

Merlin knows Arthur wants to let him in, and he pushes forward and opens his mouth, licks against Arthur's defences, takes Arthur's face between his hands, and Arthur laughs and bats him away and bites his lip in spite. Merlin fumbles for the laces of Arthur's breeches and finds denim and a zip and that sensation jolts him back to reality.

'What the-'

'Don't know,' Arthur huffs. 'Don't care.' He reaches for Merlin's shirt, trying to yank it out of his waistband, and then suddenly stills, takes his hands away. 'I mean, unless you don't-'

'I-' Merlin starts, going for Arthur's fly again.

'Tell me you want to,' Arthur demands. 'Tell me this isn't something someone put in our drinks. Tell me you want this.'

'Yes,' Merlin hisses, yanking Arthur forward.

'I know you,' Arthur whispers, and shapes a hand to Merlin's cheekbone, trails it down to his shoulder. 'I know you - Merlin, I-'

'Shut _up_ , you prat.' Merlin can't be doing with this any more, and he drags Arthur right up against him, plants his shoulders against the bookshelves and wraps his heels round Arthur's arse, kicking off the stupid bloody shoes, and somehow he expects leather when he puts his fingers back on Arthur's shoulders, he expects treebark through scratchy linen when he grinds back, and Arthur's eyes are dark and dilated when he unbuttons Merlin's shirt, and all the while this is exactly how he was feeling before, this uncertainty and newness and _want_.

'What does it feel like? Merlin whispers. 'What does-'

'You smell of horses,' Arthur says, pushing forward and back and up and down on his heels, automatic as the tides, dragging against Merlin everywhere he's sensitive. Arthur's voice sounds distant. 'You feel like something I'm not meant to have, you smell of stables and hay and warmth, God, I've wanted this so long-'

'I want you.'

'I want you too, but we can't-'

'We _are_.'

'Dammit Merlin,' Arthur rasps, and wheels around, taking Merlin with him until the weight is too much and Merlin has to slip his feet back down to the floor. They tumble together onto the plush carpet and the smell of leaf-mould rises around them, rich and mushroomy, and Merlin cannot begin to bring himself to care about the state Arthur's hunting leathers are going to get into, even though he's going to have to clean them, let alone what's going to happen to his own clothes, because Arthur has dragged himself half-over Merlin's body and it's too good, even if Arthur's callouses aren't what Merlin remembers them being -

'If my father finds out-'

'I don't care,' Merlin says, because the forest is so far from Camelot he cannot even see the smoke from her fires. Nothing has ever felt so distant from him as reality does right now, the only thing is Arthur and his eyes squeezed shut, his hand between Merlin's legs, the moon casting her halo like a crown over Arthur's head as she rises.

'He expects me to leap the fires with Lord Edgar's daughter tonight,' Arthur says, his hand rough and frantic on them both, so good and right, so forbidden.

'I don't care,' Merlin says again, because he doesn't. Because no-one is ever going to keep them apart, no father nor woman nor priest, Merlin doesn't care and he'd walk through walls and deserts and fires for Arthur. 'You're mine,' he says, and he feels the earth move beneath him and the magic move within him, it feels like a spell as he says it. 'You're mine, it doesn't matter what comes between us,' he says, and Arthur's wild now, hot and desperate, and they follow each other over the edge so close, who knows who fell first-

-and they land on carpet, Merlin's dress trousers a ruined mess beneath them and Arthur's jeans rubbing a fierce graze down both their thighs.

'What. The fuck,' Arthur asks. 'Merlin you idiot, you magicked us both-' He stops as he realises what he's said.

Behind Arthur, the moon is rising - the panes of glass in the window make its outline ripple - and it crowns him once again like it did a thousand years ago. Merlin feels memories, this huge ... life, this huge destiny ... slot into place behind his eyes.

'We should get back down to the party,' he offers weakly. Arthur pulls himself to his feet and offers his arm to Merlin. Merlin yanks himself up but then drops the arm. 'I'm not your date,' he says, and Arthur rolls his eyes.

Just for a second, Merlin doesn't know when he is. Even after all this time, some things haven't changed. He changes his mind, takes Arthur's arm. He could never do this before, he's going to take advantage of it now. 'Come on then, let's go make your sister happy.'

'Just for the record, this is me making an honest man of _you_.'

'Yeah, yeah, whatever.'


End file.
